November 28, 2004

Funny, We Don't Look Jewish

I have recently started getting the Cal Berkeley
alumni magazine; this is somewhat mysterious, since I haven't been a member
of the alumni
society for ten years. This
month's issue features an interesting Q
& A with Prof. Yuri Slezkine,
occasioned by his new book, The Jewish Century. This appears to
be, in part, a study of Jewish history in the 20th century, with an emphasis on
the migrations to the US, to Israel, and to the Soviet Union. (The interview
includes the story of how Slezkine learned he was half Jewish, a descendant of
the latter migration.) The other meaning of the title, though is the claim
that in that century, everyone had to "become Jewish", i.e. "urban, mobile,
literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and
occupationally flexible", traits traditionally associated with Jews because of
their social niche as literate "service nomads". I can think of exceptions to
some of his generalizations (e.g., the Jewish lumberjacks of the Baltic,
described by Simon Schama in Landscape
and Memory), and some of the points have been made before --- Ruth
Laud Coser pointed out the "Jewish" character of modernity in her In
Defense of Modernity, and Ernest Gellner discussed
Zionism as the creation of a land-bound nationalism, and even (in the
kibbutzim) a peasantry, in several of his books on nationalism. But it sounds
intriguing, and worth reading in full. Chapter 1 is
online, but I haven't read it yet.

(Of course, it's a simple fact of population biology that by this
point most people must have at least one Jewish ancestor, because, if
you pick a random person who was alive in 1 AD, with high probability either
they have no living descendants, or most people are descended from them. A
somewhat different question is how many people could
claim maternal-line descent from Jews, which is what matters under the
religious law. It would be amusing to try to calculate this, and to calculate
how long it will be before everyone can claim this. As it happens, I
know that my mother's mother's ... mother came from a family of Sephardic Jews
who migrated from North Africa to Italy and converted to Catholicism in the
1800s.)